An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.
Impassioned coverage from the front lines of a historic Middle Eastern uprising.
New Yorker staff writer Steavenson (The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny, 2009) reported from Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution amid President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, and she diligently charts her thoughts and experiences in this series of biographical sketches and observances. Arriving in Cairo a day after Egypt’s Day of Rage, the author became immediately immersed in the highly volatile landscape as friendly yet scrutinizing armed citizen committees patrolled Tahrir Square while tanks and militia in riot gear ascended the Corniche El-Nile. Steavenson came to appreciate and become enthralled by this prideful population eager to commit their newfound freedom to video and social media. Traversing an “awkward mix of military with civilians,” she encountered an emboldened Egyptian counterculture, and she brings their stories to vibrant life. Among them were a prominent, politically active gynecologist upon whose panoramic balcony Steavenson met a colorful host of budding radicals; proprietors of a century-old, family-owned bakery; a young translator who accompanied the author to sprawling midnight sit-ins; a sensitive, street-wise taxi driver; and a cutthroat lieutenant colonel with Egyptian military intelligence. Collectively, their stories illustrate the rich Egyptian cultural tapestry of a triumphant people, even as a new president rose to power and violence erupted on Steavenson’s final day in Cairo. The author’s anecdotes and reflections are complemented by photographs of ubiquitous graffiti found throughout Tahrir Square, which formed an artistic voice of the people, creatively exemplifying their defiance and revolutionary fervor. Though her own personal narration bears weight to the experience, Steavenson allows the reformists she encountered to speak for themselves as they strived for social justice: “I would need to be a novelist,” she writes, “to write a better truth than these glimpses offer.”
An intensive firsthand exploration of modern Egyptian liberation and solidarity.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237525-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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